Cactus Pears review – tender and subtle story of forbidden love and a poignant awakening in India

The strictures of family and class stand between two young men and their humble dreams of happiness in an assured directorial debut from Rohan Kanawade

H ere is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed. It is a story of forbidden and unacknowledged love, or maybe semi-forbidden and semi-unacknowledged, and an emotional flowering that reveals the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old Mumbai call-centre worker who must return to his remote home village when his father dies, where he is expected to stay for the full 10-day mourning period, an absence for which he must grovellingly apologise to his boss over the phone. His dad’s final words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him a really nice meal, and the poignancy of that request is cleverly revealed by Kanawade in the later scene in which Anand’s elderly, blind grandfather reminisces about why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated Suman in the first place.

This widow, in one of the film’s many murmuringly subdued dialogue exchanges, advises Anand to stay discreet about his reasons for leaving and why he is still unmarried; the story they are sticking to is that a “girl” broke his heart. Anand painfully ponders whether to send this person a text revealing that he is back in the old neighbourhood. But more importantly, Anand reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), a poor goatherd and casual worker whose family money was long since expended on his sister’s dowry, who shares Anand’s dormant feelings for him. But Balya is under pressure to get married within a community which is collectively aware, at some level of denial, about why he is single and wants him to stop embarrassing everyone.

As the 10-day observance continues, and the time of his father’s funeral ceremony draws closer, Anand becomes more resolved about what he wants his future to look like. The cactus pears of the title are a shy gift to Anand from Balya; he has symbolically removed their prickles in advance, a touching act which only points up how the prickles are not to be removed so easily in any other aspect of their lives.